Mum in the Middle Read online

  Tilly was making gestures at me to hurry up.

  ‘You really need to get an iPhone,’ she said, picking up my ancient Nokia, as soon as I’d ended the call. ‘We can have a family WhatsApp group, and you’ll be able to do Twitter and Facebook. You haven’t even got your emails on here.’

  ‘I don’t want my emails on there. It’s bad enough getting them on my laptop.’ I could already feel a small rash developing at the mention of Twitter. ‘Keep up the tweets!’ Paul had said as he rang off, as if it were that simple. Who wanted to hear about our state-of-the-art beverages points late on a bank holiday? And what could I say about them even if they did?

  ‘Could you look at the Facebook page I’m supposed to be in charge of, if I make supper?’ I asked Tilly hopefully.

  ‘What are we eating?’

  ‘Turkey sandwiches?’

  My daughter jerked a finger in the direction of the front room. ‘You’ll be lucky. Bloody Ben stuffed it all at lunchtime.’

  I made cheese omelettes and salad and got some French bread out of the freezer. Oliver ate, but Sam, still looking pale and exhausted, said she couldn’t face a thing.

  ‘I’m so sorry if it was the fish,’ I told her. Sam shook her head looking as if she might throw up on the spot. ‘I expect it’s just a bug,’ she said weakly.

  ‘No, it was the mussels, for sure,’ said Tilly authoritatively. ‘Mum says Jinni was bad too.’

  ‘I think I’ll go and lie down again …’ Sam took the peppermint tea I’d made as a peace offering and retreated.

  ‘We’re going to have to stay here another day,’ said Oliver. ‘I’m going to phone her in sick tomorrow and tell my lot I won’t be in either.’

  ‘Stay as long as you like. I’m going early.’ I looked at Ben and Tilly. ‘There’s stuff in the freezer, but you’ll need to get more milk.’

  ‘Ben can,’ said Tilly, ‘We need cereal as well.’

  ‘Sort it out between you,’ I said, still feeling awful that I’d poisoned a potential daughter-in-law, but quietly pleased my kids would be around a bit longer.

  As I went up to bed to the reassuring sound of the TV and the murmur of my offspring’s voices, I looked across at the dark shapes of the trees swaying against the rectory, feeling a pang of guilt at not having paid more attention to the nasty note Jinni had received.

  I didn’t want to think about stealthy figures creeping through the black night when I was alone again, which would be soon. But Ben and Tilly would be here till at least Thursday.

  That was good. Who cared about the electricity bill? Or – as I tripped over a damp mound in the dark bathroom and crashed into the radiator – the wet towels.

  Chapter 12

  I came out of a deep dream about Jinni being trapped up a chimney and Malcolm instructing Gabriel to rescue her, while Tilly told me the whole town had toxic shock from my glazed carrots – to find the alarm in full, penetrating beeping mode and the time showing as 5.01 a.m.

  As I sighed and stretched, every fibre of my body screaming to stay in my warm bed instead of getting up in the cold, I realised there was something strange about the room. It wasn’t dark enough.

  An odd light was bouncing off the walls and ceiling. Sitting up, I gazed out of the side window at the end of my bed across to the cottage roof next door and suddenly I was wide awake.

  We’d had snow!

  I’d heard something vague on the weather forecast but hadn’t thought it meant Northstone. I pulled my robe on and went to look properly. The front windows revealed a white driveway, my car was a white mound, the road beyond covered in a white carpet. The coated branches of the trees showed a fall of at least two or three inches.

  In bloody April, for God’s sake.

  I ran downstairs, boosted the heating, checked the loo – which was still making a gurgling noise and taking a long time to drop to the right level – and put on the kettle as I jiggled my cold feet up and down on the kitchen tiles, wondering where my slippers were and gazing out at the whiteness of the back garden.

  I made a jasmine tea – glad I didn’t like milk because there was none at all now – scribbled a note for Tilly telling her to ask Jinni for the number of a plumber, and hurried back upstairs, throwing myself in the shower while trying to think of what to wear that would be warm and still look half-respectable for the meeting ahead. Nobody stirred in the rest of the house as I pulled on thick coloured tights and put my leather ankle boots in a shoulder bag.

  Then I collected up laptop and papers, put on gloves and wrapped a pashmina around me over my thick wool jacket, stuck my feet in my wellies and sent up a short prayer that the bad weather wouldn’t mean delays.

  There were no lights on at Jinni’s as I made my way tentatively down the drive. The snow was even thicker than it had looked now I was picking my way through it. I turned out of the gate and, heaving the bag onto the other shoulder, began to plod down the road in the direction of the station.

  It was freezing but rather beautiful – the undisturbed snow stretching away from me for as far as I could see, glittering in the streetlights. A fox appeared from a driveway and stood stock, still staring at me for a moment, then ran across in front of me, leaving a trail of footprints in the soft white powder. I wound my wrap more tightly around my neck, hoping the small coffee kiosk might be open when I reached the station. I was already feeling the need for caffeine. Not to mention, now I came to think about it, toast.

  I hadn’t left this early since I’d moved. But this was a three-line whip. I needed to be in the office by 8.30 a.m., to grab a coffee or three and get my notes in order. The 6.48 a.m. would get me into St Pancras at 7.36, which left plenty of time to get the tube to Liverpool Street and walk the ten minutes from there to the office and showroom. I should do it by 8.15 a.m. if I shook a leg.

  Keeping up a brisk pace wasn’t easy. I crunched onwards, stumbling slightly as a drift obscured the line between pavement and gutter and exchanging rueful looks with a newspaper delivery boy, who was heaving at a gate banked by snow on either side.

  Eventually, face glowing, I turned the last corner and saw the lights of the station ahead of me against the leaden grey sky. This road had been gritted and the remaining snow was a wet dirty sludge. There were cars parked outside and a taxi came down from the station past me as I trudged up the small slope, relieved to see what appeared to be business as usual.

  But as I walked onto the platform and almost collided with a ruddy-faced man in an overcoat, remonstrating with a long-suffering-looking rail employee, it was evident things were not running so smoothly after all.

  ‘This doesn’t happen in Canada!’ he was saying loudly. ‘It doesn’t happen in Germany. Only this country grinds to a halt the moment we get any weather.’

  The ticket collector was a picture of studied politeness. ‘Yes, I’m sorry about that, sir, unfortunately I do not control the weather myself, or choose when the trains are able to run …’

  A woman in a long red coat standing a few feet away from them met my eyes despairingly. I looked up at the electronic board above her head. It was blank. ‘Is the 6.48 going?’ I asked her anxiously.

  As I spoke, the display flickered and returned. ‘London St Pancras CANCELLED’. My heart sank to my wellingtons.

  ‘Oh bloody hell,’ I said to the woman. ‘I really need to get there.’

  The ticket collector turned to us. ‘There might be one in an hour.’ The woman shrugged and moved off along the platform, where knots of people stood about resignedly.

  ‘Nothing going to London before that?’ I wouldn’t make the start of the meeting if I had to wait that long

  The ticket collector shook his head. ‘Doesn’t look like it.’ He flicked a gaze at the bloke with the briefcase, who was still glowering, ‘and absolutely nothing I can do about it either.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ I thought of Paul and the new clients and his voice when he heard I wouldn’t be there to explain the intricate strategies at work i
n the placing of the communal photocopier to the right of the recycling point and not opposite the coffee machine. His blood pressure would be off the scale.

  ‘Unless you get the next one to St Alban’s and change onto the Charing Cross …’

  I had to stand all the way, but by the time I hurried into the tube at Embankment I had a fighting chance of reaching the office before the clients. I’d sent Paul a text warning him I’d been delayed, but had no response. I imagined him pacing, on his umpteenth coffee, his poor, long-suffering secretary, Ruby, assuring him for the third time, that yes the iced water was in place and the biscuits were nicely arranged near the teacups.

  It was raining at Liverpool Street and I dodged a sea of black umbrellas, as, head down, I hurried along the wet pavements.

  ‘He’s in a right flap,’ Ruby looked me up and down as I ran up the stairs beside the showroom and burst through the doors at 9.22, hair plastered to my head, pulling off my damp jacket and pashmina.

  ‘No trains,’ I panted. ‘Snow where I am.’ I shot past her towards the loo. ‘Tell him I’m here now?’

  My eye make-up was smudged and my nose was red. I held my head under the hand dryer in an effort to fluff up my locks before applying another generous dollop of lipstick. I now looked manic.

  ‘You are an absolute star,’ I told Ruby, who held out a mug of black coffee as I emerged. ‘Are they here yet?’

  ‘Just arrived.’ She put a sheet of paper in my other hand. ‘Paul’s latest staff briefing. Usual bollocks.’

  I slid into the last chair nearest the door in the meeting room just as Paul was effecting the introductions between clients and ‘the team’.

  ‘Sorry,’ I mouthed, as his eyes met mine.

  He glared.

  Presentation over, I spent the afternoon in a slump over the computer desk in the tiny corner I was allocated when in for the day. Nikki was away this week – her mother had broken a hip – so I missed out on our usual gossip. But the clients had smiled as they left and once Paul had done his yogic breathing, he had stopped by to tell me he was pleased.

  ‘They’re very keen for you to start work on Croydon,’ he said. ‘And they’ve now acquired premises in Dover.’

  ‘Are they working their way through the alphabet?’ I enquired. ‘It was Basildon last time they were here.’

  Paul looked pained. ‘Let’s not question their methods,’ he said. ‘Think of the turnover.’ He brightened as he paused to consider it.

  ‘And you get off,’ he added kindly. ‘If the weather is bad your end.’

  I gathered up my folder of papers. I’d make the 17.11 if I left for the tube right now.

  Jules, one of the sales managers, came thundering down the stairs behind me. ‘Hope you get home okay,’ she said. ‘Baz just called and told me to get moving, there’s a load more snow on the way and all the trains beyond Ashford are taking forever. It’s been on the news.’

  ‘Hope you do too, then,’ I said. Jules and Baz were also living their dream, doing up a cottage near Wye in Kent, with half an acre, dogs, chickens and a wood-burning stove. The pictures looked gorgeous, but a couple of winters ago she’d been snowed in for three days and Paul had been in meltdown. Jules blew me a kiss and ran on past me. ‘April!’ she called, as she disappeared into the wet street.

  April. It had been like this when I was pregnant with Oliver. We’d been staying with my parents in Faversham and the kids next door had built a huge snowman in the street. ‘More chance of snow at Easter than Christmas,’ my mother had declared, random statistics being her speciality, which Rob and my father, in those pre-internet days, had disputed with her for some time.

  You didn’t get arguments like you used to, I reflected as I turned, already wet and cold, into Liverpool Street station. When my father was alive, he and my mother would spend many happy hours wrangling over who starred in a particular film, the name of the major river in Cambodia or which news broadcaster was married to the children’s author my mother had been to school with.

  Encyclopaedias and atlases would come down from the shelf, friends and family consulted and it would still frequently not be settled until a trip to the library had taken place the next day.

  Or, on one memorable occasion, my mother had phoned the BBC and worked her way through several layers of personnel until she got a definitive answer.

  Would their marriage have lasted so long, I wondered, if there’d been Google?

  I had to phone Alice, I reminded myself guiltily as I stood squashed into a corner in the tube, damp bodies pressing in all around me. I’d had another long email demanding a summit meeting on Skype to decide what was To Be Done. I had no excuse now Easter was over.

  The tube reached Moorgate and more people piled in. I was glad I no longer had to do this every day. I wanted to be home on my sofa.

  I walked into St Pancras and the crowd of commuters looking up at information boards peppered with delays. There appeared to be nothing moving in my direction at all.

  Shit.

  M&S was a bunfight, the new Italian coffee place heaving. I joined the queue for Pret a Manger that stretched across the concourse, spotting the red-faced man who’d been creating on the station this morning standing a few yards away talking to–

  ‘Tess!’ Ingrid’s son David bounded towards me, putting his hands on my shoulders and kissing me on both cheeks. As I spluttered in surprise, he grasped my arm. ‘There you are!’ He shone a huge smile on me and propelled me away from the line of people. ‘Let’s get that drink.’

  As I scrabbled among other people’s legs for the bags that had been at my feet, he waved expansively at red-face. ‘See you later, Frank!’

  ‘The train could be hours,’ he said in a low voice. ‘And Christ, he’s boring.’

  He picked up the carrier with my boots sticking out. ‘You came prepared, then? It’s not just snow now. There’s some sort of security alert – or more likely a body on the track – so we may as well amuse ourselves. Come on!’

  Too taken aback to do anything else, I scuttled obediently after him as he strode off ahead of me through the throngs, swinging my wellies as he wove his way around the bodies and up the escalator. He headed for Searcys Champagne Bar. ‘I’m celebrating!’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Shall we have a bottle?’

  Chapter 13

  There was a crowd at the bar but David dived into it and emerged holding a stool. ‘Here!’ he said positioning it in a tiny free spot by the entrance. ‘Sit there!’

  He went back into the throng and returned with an ice bucket and two glasses. His suit jacket and tie were as crisp and magazine spread-ish, as if he’d just got dressed, his trousers sharply creased. I felt bedraggled and frumpy. My make-up had long disappeared. My hair, never good in the rain, was a frizzed disaster.

  He was smiling at me as if I were gorgeous. Frank must be terminally tedious indeed. ‘Did you have trouble this morning?’ he asked, as he deposited the bucket on a ledge, lifted the white cloth and began to pour.

  I told him the story. ‘I saw that chap Frank on the station. He wasn’t very happy.’

  ‘He’s always complaining about something.’

  He handed me a glass and chinked his against it, leaning casually against the partition between bar and the rest of the station. ‘I was delighted to see you standing there. I was afraid I’d be stuck with him till we got home.’

  He sipped his champagne. ‘Instead – what a treat.’

  I smiled back awkwardly. ‘What are we drinking to?’

  ‘I got the new project I really wanted.’

  ‘Well, congratulations. You’re an architect, aren’t you?’

  He nodded, still smiling. He really was very good looking, I thought, as he began to tell me about the development near London City Airport. A Chinese consortium had bought a swathe of land and David’s company had got the contract to design the centrepiece office block.

  There were only four of them in the business – they had a tiny office in
Holborn – but their client list was prestigious.

  ‘My partner, Jason, is Eton and Oxford. All our first clients were called Bunny or Barrington-Babbington-Smythe and wanted us to give the Knightsbridge basement excavation a post-modern twist as a pleasant change from the country pile.’ He laughed.

  ‘But this is the most fantastic opportunity,’ he went on, voice animated. ‘It’s the first time I’ve really been able to bring my own vision to a building. Usually one is so confined by the clients’ needs and the existing structure. But an entirely new build – they’ve seen the artist’s impressions and they’re going with one of my ideas – I’m very excited.’

  He looked it. His face was alight.

  I drank some more as he talked about his plans, involving mirrored glass and steel and reflections from the river. ‘It won’t be quite the size of the Shard but it will be a prominent part of the skyline.’

  He’d been working on the proposals for months, he told me, fighting off all kinds of competition and spearheading the project himself – this deal wasn’t from one of Jason’s establishment cronies. ‘Though one did tip us the wink the Chinese were buying, long before it was public knowledge.’

  The champagne had perked me up. As David talked on, about vertical villages, the high price of land and the need for every last square metre to be utilised to maximum efficiency and I nodded – familiar with these factors in my own work – I began to feel quite pleased the trains were delayed.

  He gave me another huge smile. ‘It’s so nice to have someone to talk to about it on the way home.’

  I laughed self-consciously. ‘I don’t talk about work very often either,’ I said. ‘The positioning of hot-drinks stations and how many drawers are required per employee isn’t very gripping.’

  ‘I’m interested!’ He was looking as if he really was.

  ‘Tell me more,’ he continued. ‘My mother said you’d moved from here. Fed up with the smoke?’

  By the time we’d finished our second glass, I’d given him a potted history of my illustrious career, the move from Finchley in order to buy somewhere bigger than a rabbit hutch, and had progressed, without being prompted in any way, to the achievements of my children.